A letter to to the Canisius College Community:
Over the 2009-2010 academic year, ITS will migrate all users from a Novell network environment to a Microsoft Network environment (Windows Server) and from Mirapoint Griffmail and Oracle Calendar to Microsoft Exchange.
For the last twenty years, Canisius College has used the Novell Netware as its
network operating system. It has handled our workstation logins, our file sharing, our printing, and the sharing of our personal web pages.
Because of changes in technology as well as market trends, we now believe that a Microsoft network environment will provide better performance, more reliability, and more functionality. More and more, we are finding that many computer programs that would be helpful to the Canisius Community easily integrate with Microsoft Server and do not integrate easily with Novell. Because most institutions of higher education, as well as most businesses have already migrated to Windows Server, Novell is becoming much more difficult and costly to support as its market share decreases.
Similarly, the Mirapoint Griffmail and Oracle Calendar systems systems will be
replaced with Microsoft Exchange. This will offer the campus benefits such as:
· An improved user interface. Faculty and staff will be able to access their
information via the Web, Microsoft Outlook, or other clients if they so choose.
· Improved processing of spam, virus, and other “malware.”
· A universal campus calendar that can be used to schedule meetings.
· Improved support for mobile users.
· A path toward using more advanced applications for collaboration and
document sharing.
What does this mean for you, as a user? At some point in the near future, you will be contacted by a member of our Academic Computing team about the conversion of your office or department from Netware to Windows Server. This Fall Semester, Academic Computing expects to migrate all computer users in Bagen, Lyons, Health Science, and Old Main. Our Academic Computing team will modify the configuration on the computers in your department so that you are using the Windows Server environment. None of the personal data on your computer will be lost, and you will retain access to all of your departmental data on network drives as well. You will notice an immediate performance improvement for logging in and accessing shared data on the network drive.
Within four weeks after the Windows Server migration, Help Desk staff will convert you from Mirapoint email (Griffmail) to Microsoft Exchange.
Thanks very much for your time, and thank you in advance for your cooperation. I realize that this is a busy time for many departments, and I appreciate your accommodation of Academic Computing personnel in this next phase in the evolution of our College network. If you have any questions or concerns, please call the ITS Help Desk at 716-888-2299 or me at 716-888-8410.
Joel A. Cohen, Ph.D.
Associate Vice President for Library and Information Services